Integral Theory - what is our problem?

This comes from my brother's blog. He is writing about an Op-ed piece by Thomas Friedman about nature conservancy. I have starred and highlighted the two sections that I feel most appropriate to our dialogue (paragraph 6 and the last line of the post). 

Notice the word "integrated" above. As I struggle to explain Integral Theory to everyone, one thing I keep coming out with is that it's mostly a different way of looking at things, a different set of lenses through which to look at the world, one which tries to take into account that reality is unified. 

What this means is that if there's a problem, it's most likely either one of viewpoint, or one of orientation. 

How can a change of viewpoint change everything?

Well, remember when fire was magic, some random event or act of the gods? Of course not. Every advance that we make occurs because of a shift in viewpoint, a greater, deeper, or wider understanding, or a more encompassing, more connected worldview. 

There are no problems in the Universe. You have problems. There are two ways to eliminate them: externally and internally. If you no longer care about something (internal) it's not a problem. If you remove the external cause of the problem, it's not a problem. Both are important. You won't be a very good human if you ignore the external reality of problems. You'll probably starve to death. But you also won't be a very good human if you don't grow past some of your problems. You'll be waiting for your mother to feed you, and you'll starve to death. Both are shifts in viewpoint: you either change your view of what you are and what your relationship to the world is, or you change the way you look at the outside world, which changes what you can do to it and in it. 

***The shift in perspective that Friedman is discussing is from one where each act in the universe, or process (a series of acts and reactions through time) is basically unrelated to each other (SDi 5) to one which recognizes that every act has consequences for every other ongoing process, or that every process and system is linked to each other (SDi 6). You could also view this in terms of input and output, in the movement from an understanding of inputs and outputs occurring separately to one where every output is a different process' input, creating cycles.***

Much of where modernity has gone awry is in disrupting cycles between the output of one and the input of another, creating waste, which doesn't exist in the natural world. 

This is not to say that man has no right to tinker with what's there: as mentioned in the end of the article, we can make nature better, or rather, better for us, which is the process of solving problems externally. (Very simply, making a roof underneath which to hide from the rain.) ***What we need to understand is that instead of creating a different framework to solve every problem we have, we already have been given the perfect framework within which to work, we just need to recognize it as such.***

I take from this a strong link to the 'Sustainability and Wildness' post. Both of these writings beg for us to IDENTIFY A PROBLEM, then ERASE EVERYTHING we 'know' about that problem in order to solve it. As 'Wildness' points out we are a culture obsessed with 'sustainability' but very few people have asked themselves what the hell sustainability really means or why they actually want it.

In thinking about this competition over the summer - and in the broader sense thinking about this since discovering architecture - I spent a lot of time trying to understand what the problems are. The success of the original WPA can be traced to its simplicity. It identified one problem, unemployment, and based everything off of that single problem. As Herbert Hoover put it:

"The cure for unemployment is to find jobs" (from Nick Taylor's book about the WPA)

The only way to measure success is to define the problem. In terms of a competition, we need to remember that people will be looking at our work without us. Everything we do, every single piece of our final project has to be explicit and clear that it is absolutely necessary to solve the problem that we have identified. If we maintain this vision throughout our work it will serve us in the end. 

So what is our problem? What themes plague our communities across the country (that we can specifically address in Tigard)? Is it sprawl? Is it water? Is it oil? Is it transportation? What will we try to solve when we design for this competition? Personally I do not think we can spread ourselves thin and address every problem. I think we need to come up with something big and bold and never lose it along the way.